Teleidoscope

Sun, Nov 04, 2007

Gershwin Jazz

Posted at 12:27 pm MST to Media

The second concert in this year's Boulder Philharmonic season has a theme of pieces of music inspired or affected by other music.

The first piece was composed in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Phil by a local composer, Luis Gonzales,who is a Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Colorado. It was adequate music, but I thought it was much too ponderous, especially the third section, which was supposed to be a dance tune inspired by the city. If Boulder has a 'dance' it is the Boulder Bolder 5K race. Or maybe Kinetics. Something quick, or even frenetic, with a bit of drive and maybe a touch of strangeness.

The second piece was amazing: Gershwin's 'Piano Concerto in F', with the usual piano soloist replaced by a jazz trio (the Marcus Roberts Trio: piano, bass and drums) playing real jazz, with improvisations, not just a fixed score. Gershwin's work was inspired by jazz, but sort of squished it into a classical box -- the object of the performance was to take it back out of the box.

The drummer looked familiar: he was Jason Marsalis, of the great family of jazz musicians. I don't think I've seen him perform before, but I've seen his relatives on TV.

The pieces after the intermission were both quite good.. Brahms' "Variations on a Theme by Haydn" and Hindemith's "Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber".

The new conductor/music director of the Boulder Philharmonic has given it a different feel. The previous conductor was more traditional in some ways. This season's programs are eccentric, but a lot of fun.

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Operation: Immortal Servitude

Posted at 10:26 am MST to Media

As previously mentioned, at MileHiCon last week I attended a talk about vampires by Tony Ruggiero.

I have now finished his vampire book Operation: Immortal Servitude, the first of a planned series of 4 books. I will definitely be on the lookout for the other volumes in the series.

The characters are nicely three dimensional, except for a few who are given in-story reasons for being flat (a nice trick for handling spear-carriers -- I'll need to remember that one). I want to read more about both the vampires and the main human character. And the ending provides a nice hook for the next volume in the series.

The story moves well and the military details have a nice authentic rhythm. Mr. Ruggiero was in the Navy for 23 years and obviously paid attention to the people around him. The world builds on traditional vampire stories and adds some interesting twists of its own.

My only minor complaint is that the text could have used a little more human copy-editing. There were a few sentences that weren't, and a couple of instances of the wrong real word, especially a few instances of 'then' that should have been 'than'. But even books from major publishers show occasional copy-editing glitches, and this is from a fairly small press.

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